Editorials recall events of the early ’50s

This is the second in a series of posts showing Harry’s editorials from the newspaper in Greenbelt, MD, in the 1950s. Greenbelt is a DC suburb founded in 1937 under FDR’s post-depression New Deal. The articles offer snapshots of Harry’s writings unknown to most family and friends he left behind, plus history lessons we can appreciate today.


December 4, 1952 
“Sunday, December 7”

Most of us think of December 7 as Pearl Harbor day, and truly none of us will ever forget that tragic day of history. Every year thousands of newspapers throughout the country editorialize on the occasion of this solemn anniversary, its meaning, its significance and its implications. It is a convincing reminder that we must never allow our defenses to so deteriorate as to become vulnerable to surprise attacks by a ruthless enemy. It is a warning and a symbol of the ghastly costs of unpreparedness. We have taken that lesson to heart. We are currently expending huge sums of money to build up our military strength, and the whole purpose of this buildup is to make it unmistakably clear to any potential enemy that it would be most unwise to attack us. The sheer horror of the damage that we can deliver with our atomic weapons should make anyone think twice before risking a war. And it is our hope that behind this shield of military might, our diplomats can work out with the diplomats of the world, a true and lasting peace – a world in which the threat of war can be completely abolished – a world without weapons – a world in which men and nations can settle their disputes in a meeting room instead of on a battlefield.

But in a way, perhaps, December 7, has an even deeper meaning for us in America. For it is also the symbol of another war – a war against an enemy far more relentless and implacable than mere man. It is the birthday of a great and cherished American tradition – the birthday of the Christmas Seal. On December 7, 1907, forty-six years ago, the Christmas Seal was born.

Today in millions of American homes the Christmas Seal with the red Double-Barred Cross is as much a part of the holiday scene as the Christmas tree or Santa Claus. It carries a message of hope and good cheer, that tuberculosis can be defeated if all of us work together. In the forty-six years since the first Christmas Seal sale, tuberculosis has been forced down from first to sixth place among the causes of death in this country. But despite this progress, tuberculosis today kills more than all other infectious diseases combined. It attacks 115,000 Americans every year.

Those who buy and use Christmas Seals are helping to protect themselves and their neighbors from this killer, which attacks without obvious symptoms. They are helping the voluntary tuberculosis associations acquaint more and more people with the basic facts about TB, with the need for chest x-rays in an effort to find TB early, when it is easiest to cure. They are supporting medical research in the development of better ways of treating and preventing tuberculosis.

This is part of the personal contribution millions of Americans are making during the Christmas season. By buying and using Christmas Seals they are helping to save lives and to reduce the suffering of their less fortunate neighbors. Dec. 7 is indeed a date to remember.

December 24, 1953 
“Decision for Darkness”

Most men are able to make the vital decisions in their lives without fanfare or publicity. The twenty-two young Americans who have elected to remain in Korea with their Communist captors have had the eyes of the world focused upon them while they were making up their minds. They had a chance to stand up and testify to freedom; instead they renounced their country.

It is hard to understand the thinking of these deluded Americans. They must have witnessed the treatment given their fellow prisoners who refused to fall for the Community line. They must realize the enormity of the lies they have been told.

The time may come when they will regret their decision. It is likely that when that time comes, however, it will be too late for them to salvage the liberty they have forfeited with apparent indifference.

Americans can sympathize with the parents and the loved ones of these men whose minds have been poisoned by the Communists. It is always tragic to look upon men who have turned their eyes away from the light and entered into the kind of darkness which can consume them.

December 24, 1953 
“Newspapers”

Harry and family in 1953

“How far that little candle throws its beam”, says an old poem. It could be paraphrased, if unpoetically, to read, “How far the consequences of a strike extend”.

The New York newspaper strike, which deprived the world’s second largest city of its principal media of information and advertising for 11 days, is a perfect example. Moreover, it illustrated how unique a place the newspapers hold in a community.

The strike was brought by a photoengravers’ union which has 400-odd members employed on the major New York papers. Actually, only 207 votes were cast in favor of the strike, but it was a majority. The papers, of course, could have appeared without pictures but other unions honored the engravers’ picket lines and made publication impossible.

As a result, some 20,000 people were temporarily forced out of work, and a very large payroll was temporarily suspended. And a huge amount of holiday advertising business was lost.

This was only the beginning. To most stores, the newspaper is the dominant factor in advertising. It is the top medium for visually offering goods to vast numbers of potential buyers. No one will ever know how much retail business was lost because of the strike but many store executives are sure it was substantial. Time was bought on radio and TV stations. But these media are of only limited value to retailers for the most part and, on top of that, relatively little desirable time was available.

New York City has 10,000 newsstands and about 2,500 of them shut down entirely. All of the rest, naturally, suffered from the lack of papers to sell, which are the backbone of the business. Movie theaters and sports arenas had no effective means of publicizing their attractions.

Finally, of course, the public, which buys 5,000,000 copies a day of the New York papers, was discomfited. The news magazines diverted extra copies into the city, but there were not enough of them to meet the demand and they did not carry news with the local slant.

Whether or not the photoengravers’ wage and other demands were justified is a matter of argument. But there can be no argument about the fact that the action of a very small number of people in a case like this can directly affect the lives of many millions. New Yorkers, today, really appreciate their newspapers.

Look for more of Harry’s editorials in the next post on this blog. (Anyone can skim the newspaper archives at:  http://www.greenbeltnewsreview.com/archives/ )

Copyright 2017, Elaine Blackman

Harry wrote novels, too

Harry in the early 1960s

Last year on this blog, I posted a slew of unpublished short stories Harry wrote during his life. Most I discovered in his boxed paper files, a few on his computer. He also left behind hard-copy versions of never-published fictional novels; or in some cases, partial versions. Several he may have drafted in the 1950s, when his Army experience was still fresh in his mind, and perhaps edited in the ’60s or later. To give you a taste of one, here’s the synopsis from his book proposal, plus the first few paragraphs of the novel’s introduction.

The book proposal

Synopsis

Clarence Webster, a commercial pilot and flight instructor before the war, joined the Army shortly before Pearl Harbor and eventually was assigned to fly artillery spotting missions and light liaison planes in the combat zone. When his unarmed plane is shot down and he is wounded and temporarily grounded, he is transferred to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. After the war ends he responds to an urgent appeal by the Army to stay on as an intelligence agent with the military occupation forces, at least for another year. Though he is eligible to return home, he agrees to stay, and subsequently extend the year for an additional six months. He finally returns to the States in December, 1946.

The story takes place in two main time periods – the last nine months of 1947 when he is a civilian in the States, and the last nine months of 1946, when he is winding up his tour of active duty in Germany. Like all veterans, he has had his fill of war, and of the Army, and of man’s cynicism and seeming inability to learn the bitter lessons of the war. He has returned to his pre-war profession as a flight instructor, but he is restless and dissatisfied, searching for some new answers, trying to “find himself”.

Though he is engaged to the “girl back home”, he cannot forget the girl he loved in Germany, even though she had betrayed his love. On the horizon is the growing threat which communism poses in a world hungry for peace and generally unaware of the full extent of the menace. A few people see the danger, but too few are doing anything about it. What, he asks himself, can one man do to help provide a greater measure of security for his country? In the end he breaks his engagement and joins the Air Force. Oddly enough he goes back into uniform for precisely the same reasons he joined up before World War II started, because his country is at war with the enemy – only the war has not yet been declared.

The writing makes extensive use of the flashback technique, contrasting his experiences and reactions during the last nine months of 1947 in Buffalo (the present) with his experiences and reactions during the last nine months of 1946 in Germany (the past), with occasional glimpses into his more distant past. The two women in his life are seen through his eyes, as well as the manner in which they help to shape his character and the effect they have upon his decisions. Though basically a love-adventure story, this is also a novel of a time so unique in American experience that it can never be fully recaptured on paper. It points up the conflict between one man’s desire for freedom and individuality, and that man’s concept of responsibility and obligation.

Introduction

The world of April 1947 was a curious place and a curious time. It was a time of tension and a time of relaxation. It was a time of anxiety and insecurity, and still, a time of hopefulness and aspiration. The aftermath of World War II was still being felt, strongly in some parts of the world, perhaps somewhat dimly in the United States. It was as though the war, like a giant hand from nowhere, had picked up the world by the neck and the seat of the pants and shaken it up a little, and the loose change had dropped out of its pockets and the buttons popped off its vest and everything was all jumbled up and confused and the pieces were still falling back but not in their proper places.

Of course, the confusion was where it had always been, in the minds of men. There was still a residual interest in the war, but it was too early to take an historical interest and besides, there were more important things to do – make money, mainly. So many odd and contradictory things were happening that reading the newspapers was almost frustrating and you could only keep track of the things that interested you.

In Germany, for example, the American Military Government, AMG for short, had just revealed that 3,278,000 of 11,825,000 Germans questioned in the U.S. zone were chargeable for Nazi activities.

This was one area in which Clarence Webster kept himself informed. He had more than a passing interest, too, in the eventual outcome of all the war crimes trials and the ultimate destiny of the men involved. In April, Rudolf Hoess was hanged at the Oswiecim extermination camp in Poland where 4,000,000 persons had been executed at his command. Gernand de Brinson, Vichy Ambassador to the German occupying forces in Paris, was executed as a traitor by the firing squad in Forte de Montrouge, near Paris. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who built up the Luftwaffe and was Hermann Goering’s chief deputy, was sentenced to life imprisonment for slave labor activited by a U.S. court in Nuremberg. Dr. Hjalmar Schact, on trial before a German denazification court in Stuttgart, denied having been a “major Nazi offender” and said he took part in 4 anti-Hitler plots from 1938 to 1944. Both Carmen Maria Mory and Dr. Percy Treite, under death sentence for the Ravensbrueck concentration camp murders, committed suicide. And Herbert Backe, Nazi Food & Agriculture Minister, hanged himself in a Nuremberg jail. ...
  
Copyright 2017, Elaine Blackman

Harry’s wit and wisdom in more random letters

If you have enjoyed the letters Harry wrote in several earlier posts on this blog, you’ll like the following letters, too, also recovered from his computer files. They add humorous and thoughtful details to what we know about his personal life. And, they further prove that he could write about anything.






January 1991 – Undergraduate Advising Center, University of Maryland

Dear Wendy:

Your letter of January 28 came as somewhat of a shock to me, since you indicated that I had a “difficult” semester in the fall. As a Golden ID Student, I audited a course in Modern Military History (History 224) and I must say I enjoyed every minute of it. Not only did I not have a “difficult” time, I had a truly delightful time. I found the course both informative and entertaining, while the Professor, Dr. David Trask, and his Teaching Assistant, Paul Moreno, both displayed a depth of knowledge that added immeasurably to the texts we studied. Indeed, I came away from the course with a feeling of satisfaction at a semester well spent and a sense of accomplishment at subject matter well learned.

You will understand, therefore, why I was at a loss when your letter suggested that I consider repeating the course or perhaps attending a workshop on “Recovering from a Bad Semester.” You also suggested that I consult my “assigned advisor”. I’d be happy to do so, except that I didn’t know I had one. Did I get one somehow while I was having a “difficult” semester? In any case, I am currently auditing the follow-up course, History 225, and I will be most pleased if this semester turns out to be as “difficult” as the fall semester.

I don’t really mean to be facetious, but I’d be very interested in hearing what bureaucratic procedure or what legal requirement prompted you to send me that letter.         


June 1991 – Richard Cohen, The Washington Post

Dear Mr. Cohen:

As a man of relatively modest stature, at five feet five inches, even more modest than yours, I truly appreciated your column entitled “Selling Us Short” in the Washington Post Magazine of 9 June. You did, however, inadvertently, I’m sure, forget to mention one other problem. In addition to the problem with shoes, which you described so eloquently, there is also the problem of men’s socks.

I refer, of course, to the monstrous hoax perpetrated on the male population of modest size by all the manufacturers of men’s socks who advertise that one size fits all – size 10-13. This is an obvious lie, and surely a violation of the law that prohibits false advertising. It may very well also be a violation of the anti-trust laws, since all the manufacturers seem to have entered into a conspiracy to hoodwink men with this “one-size” scam. Not only are those socks too big to begin with – the heel comes midway up my ankle – but it is my observation that socks are the only male garments that do not shrink but rather grow with each washing.

As a result of this nefarious practice, I and many others I know are reduced to shopping for socks, furtively, to be sure, either in the Boy’s Department or the Women’s Department, where size 9-11 is available. Unfortunately, neither the Boy’s nor the Women’s Departments carry socks of a quality and style equal to those in the Men’s Department. So I want to go on record as endorsing your call for men of modest size to rise up and rebel against the clothing manufacturers of America and their unfair sizing policies, as well as their unfair pricing policies. The trouble is, almost all of them are now in Taiwan, or South Korea, or China, or Hong Kong, or Indonesia, or Latin America, or Eastern Europe – or almost anywhere but the United States.


29 November 1991 – National Geographic Society, Washington, DC

Dear Bob:

It was very thoughtful of you to send me a copy of your December issue, and I can’t tell you how pleased I was to receive it. The pictures and the maps are phenomenal; Allen’s accompanying commentary is outstanding. Over the past fifty years I’ve read hundreds of articles and dozens of books about Pearl Harbor, but nothing I have ever seen presents so clear and graphic a summary of that event as this issue of the National Geographic magazine.

I recall very well where I was on that fateful day. I was working for one of the so-called war plants – the Bell Aircraft Corporation in Buffalo, New York – which was on a three-shift schedule at the time. Everybody knew that we could not stay out of the war in Europe forever, and that a war with Japan was probably inevitable, too. We were producing airplanes, mainly for the Russians for lend-lease, but also, we hoped, for eventual use by our own Air Corps.

It was Sunday afternoon with the plant going full blast when the loudspeakers came on with the announcement about the attack on Pearl Harbor. The grim certainty that this meant war only confirmed our fears, and when President Roosevelt announced that the Congress had declared war a couple days later, it was almost an anticlimax. I decided right then and there that I would devote my life to serving my country and, aside from my military service during the war, that’s exactly what I did as best I could as a civilian for almost forty years.

It’s hard to believe that the attack on Pearl Harbor took place fifty years ago. (It’s also hard to believe that I am seventy years old.) And it’s equally hard to believe that the Japanese are so sensitive about the subject. December 7 ought to be a day of remembrance in Japan, as well as in the United States. If they had any public relations sense at all, instead of withdrawing their advertising ($1.8 million from National Geographic alone, according to the Wash. Post), they would increase their allocations to help fund such retrospectives. Indeed, I believe that a properly planned and executed public relations campaign centered around the Pearl Harbor experience could very well help bring our two countries closer together. As it is, the Japanese seem to be fostering the impression that they would gladly do it all over again in a 1990s kind of way – not militarily, but economically.

Ah well, that’s neither here nor there. Thanks again, Bob, I really do appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Copyright 2016, Elaine Blackman